


to the ends of the earth

by snagov



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fix-It, Love, Love Confessions, M/M, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Tenderness, james is lonely in the middle of london
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:36:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24613153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snagov/pseuds/snagov
Summary: After returning to London, James finds it is impossible to settle into who he once was. Francis has a question.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 38
Kudos: 112





	to the ends of the earth

_To the ends of the earth, would you follow me_  
 _There's a world that was meant for our eyes to see_  
\- Lord Huron, _Ends of the Earth_

* * *

This is a ghost story. 

Let's open at the end. Picture two men sailing along the English coast. London comes into view, hazy and dark upon the horizon. When they move to disembark, one reaches for the other, briefly gripping at the elbow, eyes wide and worried. Blue eyes look back, reassuring. There's a gentle nod and Francis smiles at him. James' brows knit together and his breath is tight. He glances up again at London, sprawled and daunting, setting his shoulders to see how heavily the world rests this time. 

How do we come back? He doesn't understand. In their townhouse, James wanders ghostlike, trailing his hands over the fine backs of chairs, the oak woodgrain steady and reassuring. His reflection glitters back in polished brass and washed windows, too-familiar and too-bewildering. It takes three months to recover from scurvy. In the end, not long at all. Clothed, his body bears little evidence of its dissolution. James' hair is thinner than it had been once, though it is coming in again, just as thick and fine as it had been before. His face has filled out once more. Some teeth have been lost, shattered and spat out on the shale, skittering across the limestone. It doesn't matter, there are false ones to wear. Polish yourself up, clean yourself up. Don't tell us what the end of the world asked of you. 

He paces often and restlessly. Forward and backward, over and over and over again, going nowhere. Francis watches him from the parlor or the garden, setting his book down upon his lap or resting the nib of his pen against paper, the black stain of India ink spilling out across the page. 

Where is he going and what does he wish? What is at the end of him? To the end of the earth and back again. Look at his frost-burnt hands, where he had reached out once for something wide and white and missed it by inches and miles. His hands stretched out and fallen, bones crunching upon ice and stone. 

Go on, seek the Northwest Passage. Mind the bodies, mind the bones. (Some of them are your own.) 

Francis touches his elbow. James blinks, looking at him wildly. 

"You're wearing a hole in the blasted floorboards, James." 

"Yes," he mutters. "Yes, I know. I'm no company to keep, I'll leave you - "

"No. That's not - that is not what I meant."

Francis sets the bookmark squarely between the pages and stands up, resting both hands on James’ upper arms. It is the most they have ever touched. Warmth seeps through his jacket and James wonders if it is blood. He knows where his body is broken, the pink scars slowly healing on his arm, his side, at his hairline too. All of them covered up. Every dark bruise covered up. Where your body bends, cover it up. 

James searches Francis' eyes. Clear and bright, Francis looks back without blinking. _Shouldn't you be afraid? This, what we are to each other, what we never say, doesn't it sit heavily in your stomach?_ They never talk about it. Sometimes, when Francis is home early, James hides in his room. He needs to breathe, he needs to keep the boundaries up. Keep to the known map, don't wander off into the dark. At the end of the earth, it's important to watch your step. You don't know where the ground is soft, where the sinkholes hide. Where the ice is black and you might spin out. 

(Tread carefully. Keep salt in your trunk and gas in your tank. Let me know when you get home safe.)

At the end of the world, the air grows thin. It is hard to breathe. James can hear his own breathing, harsh and ragged in the quiet room. 

Francis' fingers tighten on his arms, slow and steady. 

"Come," Francis says. "Sit." _Follow me, trust me._

James allows himself to be led. It's easier to follow than he had remembered. He knows the spread of Francis' back, the even measure of his steps. The count of his breath, the exact temperature of his skin (warmth bleeding through). The brocade-cushioned sofa is large enough for four. James sits directly next to Francis, his side pressed close against Francis' own. Rough hands take his, a steady thumb passing over his knuckles. Remember a tent, pale canvas the color of a corpse. The sky a violent blue beyond. The sun beating without kindness. His own body on a camp cot, his head growing heavier. His shoulders had slumped then under the weight of living, begging Heracles to take the world for a while. Begging Hades to bear it forever. Francis had held his hands then too, carefully avoiding where the skin had split.

"Francis - " James had said. "Your shirt, I'll get blood all over you. It would stain."

Francis had smiled. A smile that goes on too long, a smile that papers over something else. "Stain it then. I don't give a damn." 

_I love you,_ James had thought then. Look here now, his hands in Francis' own, nothing red on either of them save the color that pinks Francis' ears and cheeks. James knows there's an answering flush of his own. When Francis smiles, it covers nothing. 

How is it that he sits in the middle of his own parlor, begging to come home? Once upon a time, a ship had shattered in the Arctic. Her oak hull scraped and pierced by ice, limping homeward bound, crashing upon an unfamiliar shore. When Sir George Back beached _Terror_ on the Irish coast, few had thought she would ever sail again. A shipwreck, a ruin. She had reached for the Passage and missed. A failure. Remember Francis' hands gentling over _Terror'_ s walls. Adept hands at her wheel. Remember the way he had rested his head upon her, had slept in her arms. To the south with her and to the north again. " _Would you go with me to the end of the world?_ " _Terror_ had asked. And Francis had promised to follow.

( _Terror_ , buried at sea. There is a well-worn piece of her broken mast sitting on the mantel. Francis had taken it with him when they had begun their march, leaving _Terror_ alone in the ice. Broken and beloved, never forgotten.) 

_I love you,_ he thinks again now. 

"Francis," James breathes. 

Francis inhales. His eyes flicker away briefly before looking back again to James. His touch is still firm, steady as ever. "I would ask a question of you. Please understand that if - if - " Francis swallows, his brow furrowing. "If this is disagreeable, I would swear to never to speak of it again."

James is very still. 

A minute passes, then two. Francis’ hands twitch. Finally, at length, he speaks again. 

"Are you fond of London, James?"

James frowns. "I don't understand."

Francis breathes in and his grip tightens slightly. "I do not believe you are happy here. Are you?"

"Francis - " His face is very pale. James can feel himself shaking. _Don't leave me here on this beach, don't leave me to rot, broken apart in the surf and bleaching beneath the sun._ "If you would prefer to leave, I would not stop you."

"You misunderstand me," Francis says quietly. "I am proposing to leave London, James. Together."

His bones rattle in his too-resilient skin. James looks up from the knot of their hands, his eyes dark and hooded. "Together."

"I would not go without you. You must know that."

(James does. He does not. Go fish.) 

He clears his throat. "Where would we go?"

Francis hesitates. "Does it matter?" He shifts his shoulders, something uneasy and unsaid upon them. An invisible weight. The balance of a question. "You choose. Anywhere you like." 

His hands are long and cold. The lines on his face are deeper, the bags under his eyes dig as deep as ditches. He knows what he is. Nameless and rudderless, his compass has only ever pointed north, somewhere aimless and strange. He has always fallen short in reaching for it. Some children are given different maps; James doesn't know where he is going. 

A question on Francis' brow. Are you going my way?

"What are you truly asking?" His voice is surprisingly steady. 

For the first time since a tent below an unforgiving sky, Francis looks uncertain. Terrified. 

“I would ask you to share your life with me. Wherever that may be.”

James flushes. Something strange and uncertain twists within him. He cannot look up, cannot look away from the tangle of their fingers. From the raised rivers of veins on Francis’s sturdy hands, the roughness of his fingertips against James’ wrist.

“Until Miss Cracroft accepts your suit?”

There is a shift of fabric as Francis turns to him fully. He slips one hand from James’ grasp and lifts James’ chin with it, tilting his gaze up to meet Francis’ own. 

“I will not be reapplying.”

Two men sit on a sofa. There is a fire in the hearth and autumn in the air. This is not King William Island, James' boots do not drag along the shale. Where he moves, there is no ice below him. When he reaches to touch, his hands do not come back cold. He reaches and there is no snow, there is nothing dead. Francis' heart beats in his own throat. 

He has been asked a question. Time to answer. 

James leans forward, hesitating only for an instant. He is certain of where he is going, though it is off the map. Still, blankness is terrifying. His long hair falls forward as he tilts in, bringing both hands up to each side of Francis' face. Nervous lips meet Francis' shaking own, both their eyes open and wide. James shakes, crashing upon Francis' shore. 

A moan, a crash, a push forward. Francis finds James' shoulders and pulls him in deeper. James has been kissed before. He has found comfort in dark rooms with open mouths and clever hands. This kiss, this kiss aches. It shimmers behind his eyelids and at the top of his spine. It spikes from his crown, down to his toes. Francis wordlessly puts question after question to him and James parts his mouth and answers them all. They are neither of them gentle now, violent in sudden relief. Francis is brutal against him. James' own eyes are shut, hot and wet. It would be too much to open them. When they break, his forehead falls into Francis' warm neck and James gasps with torn breath. His voice like raw silk, like torn newsprint. 

"Oh, thank god," James whispers. He can feel a kiss pressed into his curls, a smile curving against the top of his head. Francis' arms are still wrapped about him, tight and unwavering. Kisses trail from his forehead to his brows to his cheekbones. Francis kisses the bent bridge of James' nose (where it had been broken once) and the sharp cut of his chin. James opens his eyes, the world soaked and wet before him. Something desperate and heavy in his skin, between his legs. 

He reaches for Francis, hands hesitating over the buttons of his waistcoat, pausing in question. Francis swallows, bright-eyed and redcheeked. He gives a brisk nod. James inhales, hot in his stinging skin, suddenly too aware of the fabric of his own shirt and trousers. Want never forgets. Scars are easily inflicted by things we have wanted and never received. A birthday without gifts, a kind word never said. A lover who did not look back. 

James has never kept the lights on. Never taken his time. When he pushes the shirt from Francis' shoulders, he kisses the gentle slope of them. Each curve, rounded like the sun, spread out before him. No one says _hurry,_ no one says _I shouldn't be doing this._ He sinks to his knees like a supplicant and Francis stares openmouthed and full of wonder. When Francis cries out and his hands twitch in James' hair, James finds himself pulled up roughly to Francis' chest and kissed and kissed and kissed again. When Francis takes him in capable grip and James comes apart in the palms of his hands, he thinks of _Terror_ 's ten-spoke wheel, worn smooth by loving touch. He gasps, the world gone white (as white as a blank page, unwritten; as white as a land of ice and snow). Francis buries his nose into James' neck, whispering fierce, desperate words of love. 

This is a love story. 

There will be changing winds. Mind the weather, mind the storms. Keep an eye on the ice and the shoals. There will be a house in the country with wildflowers up to the door. See the roseroot, see the lady's mantle. Pick the roses, bring them home to the one you love. There will be fresh milk and hot tea, sugar kept in a porcelain jar. Sunday dinner and darned socks, unmade beds and greyer hair. There will be a dog to sleep on the back steps and a cat to get the cream. 

Somewhere, half between sleep, decades from now, James will wake on a winter morning to a chill in the air with a half-broken _Erebus_ still fading from his dream. He will not forget her, nor _Terror._ Perhaps they have sunk to the bottom of the ocean, driven down by compounding ice. Their hulls smashed (to atoms), their reinforced beams bent by brutal force. He will reach for Francis, feeling the vertebrae of his spine, the shift of solid muscles in enfolding arms. 

"Do you suppose they will find them?" James asks. " _Terror_ , I mean. And _Erebus_." 

"Someday," Francis says, nodding. "Perhaps."

"An act of hubris we nearly did not survive," James repeats faintly, remembering an ancient conversation. "Most - most did not." 

"James," Francis reaches over and pulls him to his chest, square fingers running through James' tangled hair. "Leave the talk to them. It does not concern us." James breathes in, catching the steady scent of cotton and salt. He nods and feels Francis wrap around him, always warm. Turn the light off. Close the door. Someone will tell a ghost story; tonight, it will not be him. When he closes his eyes, the world is white and the map unmarked. 

Go on, take the hand of the one who loves you, one warm line through a land so wild and savage, leading somewhere safe to sea. 


End file.
